News Archive - 2012

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of
PHP 5.5.0alpha2. This release adds new features and fix some bugs from alpha1.
All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully,
and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.

THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!

PHP 5.5.0 Alpha 2 comes with new features and improvements such as (incomplete list) :

Support for using empty() on the result of function calls and
other expressions,

Systemtap support by enabling systemtap compatible dtrace probes on
linux,

After a very successful 2012 edition, we are proud to announce PHPBenelux
Conference 2013. This event will take place on Friday January 25th and
Saturday January 26th 2013 in Antwerp, Belgium. We organize a community
oriented conference that is built around an excellent lineup and awesome
socials. Our schedule has been announced and tickets are available. Go to
http://conference.phpbenelux.eu/2013/ for more information.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.10 and PHP 5.3.20. These releases fix about 15 bugs. Please note that the PHP 5.3 series will enter an end of life cycle and receive only critical fixes as of March 2013. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.

We are pleased to announce that tek13 will be taking place this
year again at it's traditional location in Chicago, IL. This year's
dates are from May 14th - 17th, 2013. It will again be a 3-track
conference with a focus on the community.

The Call for
Papers has been announced and will be running until January 15th,
2013. Conference registration will open on January 1st. We look
forward to seeing many of you there this year!

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of
PHP 5.5.0alpha1. This release marks the beginning of the PHP 5.5.0 release cycle.
All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully,
and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.

THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!

PHP 5.5.0 Alpha 1 comes with new features such as (incomplete list) :

support for Generators,

a new password hashing API,

support for finally in try/catch blocks

support for list() in foreach,

constant array/string dereferencing,

ext/intl improvement.

We also dropped support for Windows XP and 2003.

You can read the full list of changes in the
NEWS file contained
in the release archive.

SoFloPHP is excited to present the inaugural SunshinePHP Developer Conference in Miami, Florida
from February 8th - 9th, 2013. This 2 day event will feature 3 awesome tracks, with one track
dedicated to Symfony. We are also planning an Uncon, as well as a hack event, and many
opportunities to socialize with the PHP community. Please register soon to take advantage of
our early bird discounted rate before it ends.

In February when the rest of the world is cold and snowy, it is sunny and beautiful in
Florida. Come join us for some sun and learning.

Our call for papers runs until December 1st, 2012, so please get those talks in! We will
be announcing the sessions and speakers around mid-December after our board has a chance to
consider each submission.

PHP London are pleased to announce the 8th Annual PHP UK conference;
a 2-day event with 4 great tracks held at at The Brewery in the heart of the City of London on February 22nd- 23rd 2013.

With over 600 delegates, speakers, and sponsors, PHP UK conference aims to deliver fantastic up to date content about
PHP and related web technologies in a comfortable and professional setting. There are countless networking opportunities
to engage with international speakers and delegates, which makes the event one you won't want to miss.

Our call for papers is open until November the 22nd and we would love to hear from you!

True North PHP is a 2 day, multi-track, community-driven PHP conference.
We believe that the PHP community is second to none, and also believe
that Toronto has an awesome PHP community and deserves an equally
awesome conference.

Come out November 2-3, 2012 and hear both local talent and
internationally known members of the PHP community share their thoughts
and tools they use to build the web.

The Web Developer Conference (WDC) is the conference for web developers from the 24th – 27th
June 2013 in Nuremberg (Germany). The conference is addressed to developers of web applications,
content and online managers, agencies and webmasters. The WDC will be presented by the German
trade magazine "web & mobile developer". More information about the conference can be found on
the website via www.web-developer-conference.de.

MidwestPHP (March 2 and 3rd, 2013 - St. Paul, MN, USA)
is a two-day conference in the heart of Minnesota featuring 40+ sessions covering a
wide range of topics ranging from PHP basics for newbies to advanced PHP concepts,
frameworks, databases, third party tools and components, and web development.

CodeConnexx (8-9 November, 2012, Indianapolis, IN, USA)
is a two-day, one track conference that aims to bring together men and women of all ages, races, backgrounds,
and skillsets interested in talking about code. The first day is focused on technical talks, centered around
PHP and related topics. The second day is dedicated to all the other things that we encounter as developers:
mentoring, working together on a diverse team, getting started in open source, and other topics. Free onsite
childcare will be available for those who need it. We hope you can join us!

Once again the conference will explore key topics and core technologies for developers and decision makers.
It will be demonstrated how to scale your applications, explain the details of Continuous Integration or
evaluate different approaches to NoSQL.

Attendees will have the opportunity to meet with speakers, core developers and consultants, and there are often opportunities to evaluate your code.
Community and enterprise projects profit from its international reputation and impulses given from the developer community.

ConFoo is one of the most important developer-oriented conferences loaded with PHP content. ConFoo 2013 will be held on February 25 through March 1 in Montreal, Canada.

The team just opened its call for papers. Candidates can submit proposals until September 23. Consult the call for papers page for details and to start submitting. That page also explains what expenses ConFoo can cover for speakers. You can even get advice on how to write proposals.

The call for papers is public, meaning that all proposals get published on the website for others to vote and comment on. This approach allows the organizers to pick subjects that have most interest in the community. The comments are only visible to speakers and organizers to avoid influencing the votes.

To stay in touch via Twitter, follow @confooca and use the #confoo tag. You can also help promote the event with these cool badges for your site.

Organised by developers for developers,
PHPNW12
is the perfect opportunity to learn, network and mix with peers and
industry leaders, as well as discover the latest tricks, techniques
and innovations in PHP and internet development.

Come to Manchester and join in this year's fabulous
PHPNW conference.
Building on the success of previous years, we have a bigger schedule,
more venues, more great content and hopefully more fun than ever!
With speakers from across the PHP sphere and its allied technologies,
there is something for everyone at this event, and always someone to
talk tech to if you want to.

Starting on the Friday with our
Tutorial Day
which is a fantastic opportunity for individuals and teams of PHP
developers to come together for a full day of hands on teaching tailored
just for you. Whether you want to know more about Building a Zend
Framework 2 Application, Tools of the PHP Trade, Hands on debugging with
Xdebug, Test your code like a pro – PHPUnit in practice, Create your own
PHP Extension step by step or Scaling Your Team Using HubFlow – A Git
Workflow For Git Hub, this will be the experience for which you have
been waiting.

The PHP 2012 conference (ZendCon) offers you the chance to learn from a huge variety of technical sessions and in-depth tutorials. International industry experts, renowned thought-leaders and experienced PHP practitioners are on-hand to discuss PHP best practices and explore future technological developments.

This year promises to be the best ZendCon ever! We are planning a fun new exhibit hall, some great parties including a hackathon and, of course, oodles of excellent PHP content!

Learn PHP best practices for architecture, design and development

Discover new advances in the PHP language and how to best harness them

Learn how to effectively leverage Zend Framework and get hands on with coding in Zend Framework 2.0

Gain insights from peers, PHP luminaries, community members and thought-leaders

This event, in the heart of London's vibrant technical scene, brings
together the best minds from open source enterprise software development.
The newly-formed Sensio Labs UK is delighted to serve up a UK edition of
the wildly successful Symfony Live events, with two days (September 13th & 14th)
of excellent technical content for you to enjoy.

Day one is workshop day,
we'll spend the day absorbing knowledge from
industry leaders in a choice of two in-depth workshops. On workshop day
we're also offering the opportunity to take the Symfony Certified Developer
Exam - be sure to book your slot if you think you have what it takes!

For the main conference day
on Friday we're pulling out all the stops to
make this a festival of technology and inspiration that you'll remember.
Whether you're new to Symfony, already using Symfony 1, or an experienced
developer looking to find out more, this event will have something to make
you glad you came along.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate
availability of PHP 5.4.5 and PHP 5.3.15. This release fixes over 30
bugs and includes a fix for a security related overflow issue in the
stream implementation. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to
PHP 5.4.5 or PHP 5.3.15.

The Northeast PHP conference is a two day event coordinated by three PHP user groups in the northeast region:
Boston PHP, Atlantic Canada PHP, and Vermont PHP. The entire event is being organized organized by community
volunteers and members just like you. We are completely non profit, and open source.

There will be nothing quite like it. With two fun-filled days full of great topics from over 40 experts, it's like three years of Meetups jam packed into two days!

PHP 5.3.12/5.4.2 do not fix all variations of the CGI issues described
in CVE-2012-1823. It has also come to our attention that some sites use
an insecure cgiwrapper script to run PHP. These scripts will use $*
instead of "$@" to pass parameters to php-cgi which causes a number of
issues. Again, people using mod_php or php-fpm are not affected.

One way to address these CGI issues is to reject the request if the query string
contains a '-' and no '='. It can be done using Apache's mod_rewrite like this:

There is a vulnerability in certain CGI-based setups (Apache+mod_php and nginx+php-fpm are not affected)
that has gone unnoticed for at least 8 years. Section
7 of the CGI spec states:

Some systems support a method for supplying a [sic] array of strings to the
CGI script. This is only used in the case of an `indexed' query. This
is identified by a "GET" or "HEAD" HTTP request with a URL search
string not containing any unencoded "=" characters.

So, requests that do not have a "=" in the query string are treated
differently from those who do in some CGI implementations. For PHP this
means that a request containing ?-s may dump the PHP source code for the
page, but a request that has ?-s&=1 is fine.

A large number of sites run PHP as either an Apache module through
mod_php or using php-fpm under nginx. Neither of these setups are
vulnerable to this. Straight shebang-style CGI also does not appear to
be vulnerable.

If you are using Apache mod_cgi to run PHP you may be vulnerable. To see
if you are, just add ?-s to the end of any of your URLs. If you see your
source code, you are vulnerable. If your site renders normally, you are not.

To fix this, update to PHP 5.3.12 or PHP 5.4.2.

We recognize that since CGI is a rather outdated way to run PHP, it may not be feasible to
upgrade these sites to a modern version of PHP. An alternative is to
configure your web server to not let these types of requests with query
strings starting with a "-" and not containing a "=" through. Adding a
rule like this should not break any sites. For Apache using mod_rewrite
it would look like this:

If you are writing your own rule, be sure to take the urlencoded ?%2ds
version into account.

Making a bad week worse, we had a bug in our bug system that toggled the
private flag of a bug report to public on a comment to the bug report
causing this issue to go public before we had time to test solutions to
the level we would like. Please report any issues via bugs.php.net.

DevConf is the ultimate meeting place for russian-speaking web-developers,
combining several language-specific conferences under one roof.

This year DevConf will include the following sections:

DevConf::PHP();

DevConf::Perl();

DevConf::RoR();

DevConf::Python();

DevConf::Javascript();

Each section will feature several talks from the active contributors/authors of the language.
Among the invited speakers are Derick Rethans (XDebug creator),
David Soria Parra (active PHP contributor), Andrey Aksyonov (author of Sphinx),
Alexander Makarov (one of the main contributors to Yii),
Sergey Petrunya (of MariaDB fame), Ilya Alekseev (OpenStack Nova contributor)
and many others, see more details on the official website.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.11 and PHP 5.4.1. These releases focuses on improving the stability of the current PHP branches with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

This is the 2nd release candidate. The release candidate phase is
intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release.
The release candidate fixes a critical issue when using the internal
classes in multiple threads.

A complete list of changes since the last release candidate can be
found in the
NEWS
file.

Please help us to identify
bugs in order to ensure that the release is solid and all things behave
as expected by taking the time to test this release candidate against
your code base and reporting any problems that you encounter to
the QA mailing list and/or
the PHP bug tracker.

The migration of the PHP source code from Subversion to Git is complete.
You can clone or fork the source from our
GitHub mirror, and we also
now support pull requests made via GitHub. The source is also available
via git.php.net, and full instructions
on cloning the php-src tree can be found at
php.net/git.

One immediate benefit is that future PHP release tags will be signed by
the PHP development team. We will be releasing GPG keys for verification
purposes in the next few days.

More information on the migration and the new workflow can be found at the
Moving to Git FAQ on the PHP
Wiki.

Please note that the PHP manual, including translations, continues to be
hosted in Subversion for the time being and will be migrated to Git at a
later date.

Many thanks to David Soria Parra for his hard work on making the conversion
to Git a reality, and to Alexander Moskaliov, Florian Anderiasch and
Johannes Schlüter for their work on the scripts required to support
the conversion. Let the forking begin!

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate availability of PHP
5.4.0.
This release is a major leap forward in the 5.x series, which includes a
large number of new features and bug fixes.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate
availability of PHP 5.3.9. This release focuses on improving the
stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of
which are security related.